Myself included.
Maybe it was just the long, warm, spring-almost-summer days that had lifted my mood, or maybe it was that I felt my wrists getting stronger, my hands stretching farther, my playing ability shifting into something it had never been before. Maybe it was that music was alive again for me, that it was speaking to me instead of lying there like some heavy, dead thing any time I tried to find comfort in it.
I was finally sitting down at the piano and finding joy again instead of fear. I was finding comfort instead of anxiety. I was feeling like I was home instead of just wandering this Earth aimlessly.
Something inside me had shifted since working with Reese Walker.
And maybe that was the real reason for my happiness.
I shook him out of my head with an exasperated huff near the end of our guided mediation, anxious to get through the last few minutes so I could talk to my mom.
Happiness shouldn’t have made me feel so uncomfortable, but it was such a foreign feeling now, one I never thought I’d get back.
I found that happiness scared me more than numbness did.
So, I spent the entire mediation trying to figure out why that was. If my mother knew what had happened at Bramlock, I imagined she’d peg it down as something near the lines of Stockholm syndrome. I was abused by my piano teacher, and since I hadn’t worked through the tragic ramifications of that, my stupid female brain was latching onto my new piano teacher as a safety net.
But it felt like more than that.
But it couldn’t feel like more than that.
The meditation closed with a soft ding and a salutation from Deepak, and as soon as the closing words left his lips, I closed the app and let my legs flop out in front of me with a sigh.
Mom chuckled from her mat in Atlanta, opening one eye and then the other. “I take it you had a hard time clearing your mind today, mwen chouchou?”
“Can you ever be unhappy about being happy?”
Mom frowned a bit at that, stretching her arms over head before exhaling them back down to her sides. “That’s a very interesting question,” she assessed, and I watched her therapist brain kick into gear as she chewed the inside of her cheek. “It’s possible that, in an effort to be happy, you’re making yourself even more unhappy. As in, you could be focusing so much on trying to be what everyone else is, what everyone else wants you to be, that you just do more damage than good.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that. I just…” I sighed, eyes floating up to the ceiling as I tried to explain it. “I feel good here, Manman. All I’m doing is working, practicing with Reese, and playing on my own. But, it’s like in the past couple of months, everything has changed. My attitude. My skill level. My outlook on the future.”
My inability to be turned on… until recently.
I left that one out, mostly because the surprise of it had shocked me into a daze when it’d hit me. I could still close my eyes and see it — that long, suspended moment where I sat on Reese’s piano bench, staring at his lips.
Wishing I could taste them with my own.
It was the first time I’d felt anything even remotely close to desire since the night I’d had my innocence ripped from me like it was nothing. And of course, I’d felt it for the absolute last person in the world I was supposed to.
The left corner of Mom’s mouth inched up, a light sparking in her eyes — eyes so much like my own. “It’s a rebirth,” she said.
I frowned, digesting the word.
“Sarah, when you came home from school in December, you were not the young lady who had left for school in the fall,” Mom explained, rolling her shoulders back and down as she considered her words. “And I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why you came home with the decision that you were never going back, or why you threw out every bright color you’d ever owned in exchange for darkness, or why you wanted to shed weight — so much so that you even shaved your head.” She swallowed at that, but her face wasn’t one of disappointment — only one of understanding. “What I do know is that just as the trees shed their leaves and went dormant for the winter, so did my daughter.”
My heart ached at that, at the suffering I knew I’d put my mother through when I’d quit school. I couldn’t tell her why, not without upsetting her over something neither one of us could change. That was just the way the world was set up.
Justice didn’t favor rape victims. And there was no changing that narrative.
Still, I hadn’t given her any kind of explanation for why I’d dropped out, shaved my head and donated nearly all of my clothes before shopping for an entirely new wardrobe. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to be seen, that I only wanted to exist at my piano, that I only needed to be alone with what music I could still wrangle out of my bruised and bloody heart.
In the process, I’d broken hers, too.
“When you told me you wanted to stay with your uncle and study with this Reese Walker, part of me was worried. Part of me wondered if you’d lose yourself further, if you’d slip away from me even more than you already had.” Though her words were sad, she smiled, her hands floating to heart center as she pressed her palms together. “But, you have soared, my love. Your smile, it’s brighter than I’ve seen it in months. Your eyes, they are wide again with possibilities.” She tilted her fingertips toward me. “You have been reborn, mwen chouchou. And like a baby fawn, you’re trying to learn to walk on very unstable legs. Take your time. Be patient. And know that it’s okay to smile, to be happy.” She chuckled. “Even when you’re falling down.”
Something stirred low in my belly when I thought about it, when I realized all Reese had done for me without even knowing. He didn’t know how broken I was the first day I stepped into his house, or how much I doubted my own self before he even heard me play, before he told me how hard the road ahead would be.
But just like he promised that first day, he was in my corner.
And in my corner he had stayed.
Every day, I strived to see that little spark of pride in his eyes, that quirk at the corner of his mouth when I did something impressive, something he’d taught me. Earning a good job, Sarah from him was my new favorite pastime, and it’d fueled me with purpose.
Purpose.
That was what I’d been missing before.
“Now,” Mom said after a moment. “Tell me who the boy is.”
My eyes shot open, heart picking up speed under my ribcage like a locomotive. “What?”
Mom smirked. “It’s not just music making you feel uncomfortably happy,” she mused. “Who’s the guy?”
I tried shaking my head, but my cheeks warmed, betraying my verbal insistence that there was no guy.
Mom just quirked one brow.
I sighed. “I mean… I guess, there kind of is a guy, but… we can’t… he’s kind of unavailable.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“No,” I answered, picking my nails. “But, he’s just…”
My voice faded, because I had no idea how to even allude to the fact that the one and only male who could possibly be having an effect on my happiness was my piano teacher.
Mom smiled knowingly, rolling off her mat before carefully folding it up. “There are some situations when mothers aren’t the best source of advice,” she said. “Maybe you should call your roommate from Bramlock. I know she’d love to hear from you.”